


bigger than these bones

by owlvsdove



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Gen, Multi, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Season/Series 03, Therapy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-15
Updated: 2015-10-15
Packaged: 2018-04-26 10:56:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,331
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5002018
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/owlvsdove/pseuds/owlvsdove
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jemma's therapy sessions with Andrew, and the moments in between. </p>
<p>SPOILERS for Season 3.</p>
            </blockquote>





	bigger than these bones

**Author's Note:**

> edited by [sleeplessmiles](http://archiveofourown.org/users/sleeplessmiles). thank you, sarah!!!

This is not going to be fun. This is not going to be pleasant.

Dr. Garner looks at her with an eyebrow raised. Her only consistent motion is picking at the skin on her fingernails but she’s looking him dead in the eye, because part of her wants this and part of her really, really doesn’t. She’s sick of unravelling.

She’s done it before. She doesn’t enjoy it.

“Where is May?” Jemma asks bluntly, just as Andrew opens his mouth to finally begin.

He gives her a look. “You know I can’t tell you that.”

“If you wanted me to get better, you’d let me talk to May.” She crosses her arms, and it feels stale even to her.

Andrew’s whole face changes, opens up purely. “I’m surprised at you, Jemma. Manipulation isn’t really your style. Daisy, maybe, but—”

“Skye.”

He was joking, but he immediately grows serious. “Daisy has decided to embrace her birth name, Jemma. And she’d like the rest of us to do the same.”

Jemma doesn’t feel it wise to press on this topic. She can already feel something black and bitter rising in her sternum, clogging her throat, pressing relentlessly at the back of her eyes and behind her tongue.

“I don’t think I’m ready to talk about this yet,” she says carefully, quietly, rasp still clawing her voice from the way she screamed through the dust storm.

“Okay,” Andrew says. “What do you want to talk about?”

“I want to talk about where May is.”

“May is attending to personal business. Like you should be.”

She stands and starts pacing, ignoring what he said. “She didn’t even call. Nobody’s seen her. Does she even know that I—”

“I called her.”

She stops and stares at him.

“I called Melinda and told her that you were safe,” Andrew continues. “Because I knew she would want to know.”

“Thank you,” she says. She’s not crying, she’s not. “But I want to talk to her myself.”

“Why?” He changes tactics. She sees him do it.

He’s really very good at this.

“Because she’s supposed to be here with us. She’s part of our team.”

“You don’t think she’s entitled to a little personal time?” he asks.

“Of course I do!” Somehow she’s grown so listless.

“I imagine you know she’s been through a lot.” And he pauses, waiting for her to confirm before he reveals too much. Jemma appreciates that.

“Bahrain,” she replies.

“Bahrain,” he confirms. “After that happened, she didn’t take any time to heal. She shut herself down and tried to get back to work. But that event changed her, Jemma. And no matter what, these things catch up to you.”

“I see what you’re trying to do,” Jemma says. She sounds like a child, petulant and rude; and she knows it but she can’t make it stop. “You’re trying to compare me to her. But I’m not May.”

“I’m not comparing you to May. I’m saying that you, _like_ her, have been through a traumatic experience. And you’re too smart to think that I’m gonna let you go back to work without at least trying to process this.”

“I love May the way she is,” Jemma says. She’s not sure why she says it, perhaps some attempt at getting Andrew to cave. 

“So do I,” Andrew responds openly. No frills or stray emotions, just truth. And it disarms Jemma, exactly like it was designed to do.

“You could be a spy, Dr. Garner,” Jemma says, sitting back down in the seat across from him. “You’re just as sneaky.”

He smiles.

 

#

 

Jemma stands for a long time outside of May’s bunk door. Anyone who might have seen her probably thought it was strange, but Jemma doesn’t really care.

The cold metal of the untouched knob startles her, but it’s unlocked.

The air in here is just as stale as it was in her room, a soured time capsule, six months sitting in silence. She pulls it hard into her lungs, probably too hard for the pitiful, deoxygenated things they are now. Weak bronchioles, sickly alveoli.

May left some things behind, and Jemma considers briefly taking something out of her closet to sleep in. But for now, she’ll just breathe in the shitty air like she did in that place far, far away; and it’ll have to be enough.

 

#

 

“Jemma?” Dr. Garner says. She startles. “Jemma, you haven’t said anything for a few minutes.”

“People go through horrible things all the time,” she says quietly. He doesn’t seem to get her meaning, so she continues. “Other people go through terrible things without completely losing it.”

“Jemma, that’s simply not true,” he says. “Perhaps there’s some statistically rare breed of person who can pick themselves up and continue on with no help. But most people can’t.”

“I’ve never been normal, Dr. Garner,” she says, rueful smile appearing as tears well in her eyes. “I’ve always been exceptional.”

“This world isn’t what it used to be,” Andrew points out. “There have been great accomplishments as well as great tragedies. It’s not helpful to judge yourself by what you used to believe about the world. You know better than most that everything has changed.”

“ _Skye_ transformed and was fine,” Jemma argues. “Nothing happened to me and I’m a mess!”

“Nothing happened to you?”

And then she realizes what she said. “I mean, not like that.” But she doesn’t sound sure anymore.

“You told me,” he shifts. “Not to compare you to May. But now you’re comparing yourself to Daisy?”

“I don’t know,” Jemma mumbles.

“Why not compare yourself to Fitz? Or Bobbi? Or anyone else in this organization who has suffered?”

“I don’t know,” she says again. “Fitz and Bobbi are healing.”

“Ahh,” Andrew murmurs. Jemma raises an eyebrow as he ponders that for a moment. “Jemma, what happens when someone’s in a coma?”

“What?”

“Medically speaking, what happens when someone who suffered a trauma is in a coma?”

She blinks. “It depends on the patient.”

“What about for Fitz?”

She tries not to flinch. “Brain activity lowered, physical activity basically ceased.”

“And why would the body go into a comatose state like that?”

“To heal,” she answers simply.

“So,” Andrew says. “While Fitz was in his coma, he was healing. It seemed like nothing, but really his body was trying to salvage itself so that he could wake up.” Now he zeroes in. “What were you doing while Fitz was in a coma?”

She doesn’t like this question. “Nothing. Crying, mostly,” she mumbles.

“Were you healing?” he presses.

“No. But I wasn’t hurt.”

“I don’t believe that’s true, Jemma.”

It’s an overwhelming truth she doesn’t want to believe, and she tries not to let her chest cave under it. She’s trying so hard, but that trying is going to be the thing that breaks her into pieces, leaves her in dust.

Andrew doesn’t press.

“How long after Fitz waking up from his coma did you go undercover?” he asks next, glancing down at his notes.

“Do you just know everything about us?” she diverts.

“When I take someone on as my patient, Coulson gives me access to their file.”

“So Coulson trusts you.”

“He knew me when Melinda and I were married,” he confirms simply.

She answers him now, rewarding him for telling her something personal. “I left after a month,” she says. “I just needed to do something that felt useful. So I approached Coulson and May myself and asked if I could go.”

“And they just said yes?”

“May didn’t think it was a good idea,” Jemma says. “But she’s not in charge. Coulson said as long as I got some training in, I could go.”

“So only a few weeks, really, after the incident in the Med pod, you decided to go undercover.”

“Yes,” Jemma says self-consciously.

“Was that stressful?”

She huffs. “Of course it was bloody stressful! I was completely out of my depths.”

“But you still wanted to go anyway.”

She sobers, coughing delicately. “I just needed to do something else.”

He nods. “When you came back, how were you received? People must have thought it was very heroic to put yourself in danger like that.”

She rolls her eyes. He already knows the answer. “Most people just thought I was crazy. And some of them were mad that I left.”

“Like Fitz.”

“Yeah.”

“Did you have much contact with anyone on the team while you were away?”

“No direct contact, except to Coulson. But only when necessary.”

“So you were alone most of the time.”

Suddenly Jemma feels warm. She shifts in her seat. “Yes.”

“But Fitz and Daisy had each other, right? And they had the rest of the team.”

“Yes.”

“They still had a support system.”

“I suppose so, yes.”

“And you didn’t?”

She’s quiet for a moment. “I guess not.”

“So since the incident where you saved your best friend’s life,” Andrew says, and she flinches this time. “You took no personal time to recuperate, you watched your closest friend struggle with a disability that you felt responsible for, and you put yourself in an incredibly dangerous and stressful situation, isolating yourself from your support system in the process?”

The wind’s been knocked out of her, but after a moment she tries to square her shoulders, tries to give legitimacy to her past self, even though she only has vapors to spare. “What are you trying to say?”

Andrew sighs. “Jemma, what I’m saying is that you should’ve started seeing someone like me a long time ago.”

 

#

 

Fitz is murmuring, babbling in his usual way about something irrelevant. It’s all irrelevant. She just likes to hear voices around her again. But now, right now she has to interrupt him.

“Do you know why I left?”

He stops mid-sentence, blinking at her.

“Well, we know a bit about how the Monolith worked with frequencies but I don’t know why it picked you or—”

“I mean the first time,” she interrupts again.

Fitz stares for a long moment. “Oh. Erm. Yeah,” he mumbles, rubbing the back of his neck with his free hand. “Because you thought you weren’t helping me.”

She doesn’t bother correcting him. She _knew_ she wasn’t helping him. It was a fact. Instead she says:

“Dr. Garner thinks there’s a second reason.”

She doesn’t need to elaborate any more than that. He understands. “Ah.”

They are shoulder-to-shoulder, side-by-side, so when she looks at him and he looks back, Fitz’s face eclipses the rest of the world.

“I don’t care. You know that?” He doesn’t care about any of that anymore.

She blinks away fresh tears and tries to smile.

 

#

 

“So when you returned from HYDRA—”

“Ugh. Are we on this again?” Jemma bites as she sits down.

“Oh, we were never off it, Dr. Simmons.”

She hugs her knees to her chest. An armor she knows well.

“When you returned from HYDRA,” he starts again. “You didn’t have the best experience re-entering the team. Would you say that’s true?”

“Yes,” she says dutifully, if not somewhat dejectedly.

“Who was supportive of you when you came back?”

Her relatively neutral expression drops into something more hurt. God, she doesn’t want to talk about this. She doesn’t want to think about it or acknowledge it. It feels like a sucker punch, and that’s why she can’t stop the tears from coming immediately, fast and hot and deadly. She bends, pressing her face to her knees.

“There, there. It’s okay, Jemma.” She can’t see Andrew’s face, but he sounds almost surprised at how fast it came, even if he got the exact response he was looking for.

After she slows, he tries speaking again. “How close were you with Agent Triplett?”

She takes a big, shuddering breath. “I’m the reason he joined the team in the first place.”

“Is that right?”

“I asked Coulson to let him stay with us after...after Ward left. Coulson...well, he wasn’t ready to trust anyone yet. So he said that Trip was my responsibility.”

“Ah.”

Jemma narrows her eyes. “I know I’m not responsible for his death, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

“I’m glad that you know that,” he says simply, unflustered by her sudden irritation.

“He went down into the underground city even though it was dangerous, and he went after Skye. He chose those things, because that’s the kind of man he was.” Her voice grows soft as she makes these things real.

“What else did you admire about him?”

She softens. “He was just so kind to everyone. And so positive. We used to be the same in that way.”

“You used to be positive?” Andrew presses.

“Yes. I feel kind of silly looking back on myself now. I had no idea any of this was coming, but I was still so excited to go on an adventure.”

“There’s nothing wrong with that, Jemma. No one could have predicted anything that’s happened to you in the last couple of years.”

“I suppose you’re right.” She picks at a loose thread on her sleeve and tries not to feel like her own skin is unravelling.

“So why don’t we recap,” Andrew says. He’s not really asking.

“Oh, _god,_ ” Jemma mutters.

“You and your partner almost died after being betrayed by a teammate, you watched your partner suffer and that hurt so much that you had to put yourself in an even worse situation undercover, you came back to your partner rejecting you, and then soon after one of the people who supported you the most was killed in an underground alien city. Does that sound about right?”

She crosses her arms tightly, deadly. “I’m getting quite tired of this.”

“Jemma, if you weren’t, I’d be worried.”

 

#

 

Outside of the Playground there is a little courtyard, and on the grass in the courtyard there is a little cross staked into the ground. White, with his name on it, like you see marking the place of highway accidents. None of him is actually here; but she doesn’t know where else to go.

It’s dark. She thought it might be quieter, less assaulting if she went at night. She wasn’t exactly correct, but she shivers and holds on to him in some impossible way, braving terror like she had to every night she was away.

She’s still not prepared for when the door clicks open. She jerks, bone-shatteringly fast, and without realizing it she has crouched down low, brandishing her weapon.

“I’m sorry,” Skye cries immediately. “God, Jemma, I’m so sorry. I didn’t know how to get your attention.”

Breathing hard, Jemma says nothing, thumping back down on the grass.

“What are you doing out here?” Skye asks, strangely polite when it’s obvious who she’s here for.

“I miss him,” Jemma responds simply. She doesn’t really know how else to explain. She looks up at Skye, still standing, and she seems like a giant. But then the giant collapses inward.

“God. Me too.”

She’s crying. Skye is crying. And she folds herself down to Jemma’s height, cross-legged on the grass next to her.

“Sorry,” Skye mutters thickly, and she’s silent for a moment as she stares at the placeholder. “You have to understand, Jemma. You were _gone_. You were as good as dead, suddenly and impossibly, just like him, and…there was nothing. There was nothing I could do about it.”

Jemma watches, wide-eyed, tears collecting but silent.

Skye is distracted by memory, so she doesn’t see it coming when Jemma leans over and kisses her cheek.

They visit him together after that.

 

#

 

“How long does this go on for? The sessions, I mean.”

Jemma doesn’t ask because she’s bored or irritated by them; but there’s a vague anxiety overtaking her at the thought that these days are most certainly numbered.

“That depends,” Andrew replies, closing her file.

“On what?”

He looks her straight in the eye. “On you.”

 

#

 

Bobbi’s lying back lifting weights in the gym, so it’s probably not the best time to sneak in.

“Hi,” Jemma says, startling the both of them.

“Hi,” Bobbi responds. Her face betrays no shock as she lowers the bar gently and sits up, wiping her forehead with a towel.

“I want to look at your knee.”

“Jeez, Simmons. Buy a girl dinner first.”

Jemma walks further forward into the room to stand in front of Bobbi.

“I knew you would come at some point,” Bobbi says. She extends her leg out so Jemma can crouch down and inspect the brace. “You can’t resist fussing over the injured.”

Jemma’s hands stutter, light as butterfly wings, on her knee. “I worried about you.” She looks Bobbi in the eye, and Bobbi, stunned, gets her meaning.

“Jemma—”

“Don’t get upset. I _mostly_ worried about myself, I promise. But I’m not happy that I wasn’t here to help you through this.”

Bobbi doesn’t know what to say, uncharacteristic tears threatening her vision. “Fitz said the design for the brace was yours.”

“Ours, really. We were assigned a project at Sci Ops to design more efficient non-mechanical medical equipment. It never went anywhere,” she explains, removing the brace and testing Bobbi’s knee carefully.

“How’s it look?” Bobbi asks quietly. Jemma knows Bobbi’s seen other doctors but what sounds like trust saturates her voice.

“It looks good,” Jemma says. “You’ll have your full range of motion back in no time, as long as you keep up your physical therapy.”

Bobbi says nothing for a long moment, so Jemma doesn’t look up, not sure what she might see.

“Jemma?”

“Yes?”

“You know I love you, right?”

Now Jemma has to look up. There’s vulnerability in Bobbi’s eyes, rarely seen in the outside world. Bobbi’s trusting her with it, and Jemma gets the sense that this is some long-fought battle in Bobbi’s head, a shootout between herself and the mirror.

“I know. I love you, too.”

And Jemma slips the brace back around her knee slowly.

 

#

 

“Jemma,” Andrew says quite seriously. Somehow she knows immediately what he’s going to say, and fire churns in her stomach. “What was it like over there?”

A sharp intake of breath punctures the end of his sentence, and she swallows hard. It takes a lot of mental preparing as she tries to stay exactly where she is while she tells him. She licks her lips, she grips the leather of the couch. She stares him deep in the eyes, because he is real and here, and most importantly, he’s here _to help_.

“It was dark. It was always dark.”

Andrew nods.

“If the planet had intelligent life, they knew not to colonize anywhere near where I was.”

“And why is that?”

“I don’t have a better word…” And she trails off, feeling her brow furrow into nothingness.

“Jemma?”

“Monsters. There were monsters.”

 

#

 

Fitz approaches her the first night she’s out of the med bay.

“How do you want to do this?”

“What?”

Fitz leans in to talk in lower tones. “I don’t want to intrude on your privacy but there’s literally no possible way I can leave you to sleep by yourself for a whole night without checking to make sure you’re still really here so—”

“Stay.”

He gulps. Judging by the look of sheer terror on his face, perhaps she shouldn’t have invited him to her bed so readily. This is Fitz, after all.

“I’ll stay too,” Bobbi pipes up, saving them as always. Really, there’s no reason she should be eavesdropping from her lab station but that’s just who she is. “Hunter’s been gone for months. I could use some cuddling.”

“Lance has only been gone for two weeks,” Fitz says.

“Lance cuddles?” Jemma asks.

“Lance loves cuddling. You can tell him I said so.”

“I plan to,” Jemma counters. And for a second everything almost feels normal.

 

#

 

“Fitz says you sleep with the light on.”

Some part of Jemma feels like she should clam up at this, demand to know if Andrew was discussing with Fitz what she said in here, just like they used to about other people. But she doesn’t feel any sort of way about it, and that concerns her more than anything Andrew or Fitz might have said.

“I have trouble sleeping at all,” she says instead.

“How many hours a night do you think you get?”

“Total?”

“Yeah.”

“Maybe three.”

“I don’t have to tell you that’s not enough,” Andrew says, marking something on his pad of paper.

“No, you don’t. But I don’t really have any control over it.”

“I know,” he says. He really seems to, watching her with clear eyes. “That’s okay.”

 

#

 

This is a long, slow night, another one where no one can sleep.

If it seems like it’s going to be one of these nights, they flock around her. Evidently it’s something they can see on her face. They follow her around like sweet shadows, cloying but effective.

She doesn’t want to be alone. They understand that.

It’s impossible, but the four of them curl up on Jemma’s bed, not talking of sleep, not talking of anything really. Low light casts them all in yellow and brown and grey, soft and malleable, and she thinks about how different this would look if it was just another endless night out there alone.

She burrows further into the blankets.

Fitz raises an eyebrow, head propped up on his hand. “What?”

“Nothing, I just...I’m glad you’re all here.”

Fitz smiles. Bobbi moves closer. Skye murmurs something like _always._

Jemma breathes deeply.

 

#

 

“The monsters,” Andrew starts. Andrew always starts. “How did they interact with you? Did you have contact with them?”

“Are these your questions, or Coulson’s?” she asks, suspicious of his phrasing. _Contact._

“I want to know if they were predators,” Andrew clarifies.

“Yes. I suppose they were. They hunted me like they were predators and I was their prey.”

“But they weren’t successful.”

That stops Jemma’s thinking. “What do you mean?”

“Well, you’re alive. They hunted you, but you survived them.”

“I…” She gets lost in the confusion of that, swimming aimlessly through the idea that she somehow did something right.

She looks away from him. “It doesn’t feel like that. It feels like I didn’t survive it.”

“Why is that?”

“Because…you know why.” She doesn’t want to voice it. She doesn’t want to break up the wave of horror and shame and desperation into discrete, English words that can be repeated back to her, summarized and truncated, made small and insignificant in someone else’s mouth.

“Try and tell me, Jemma,” Andrew insists, in the gentlest way possible.

“Because I’m not me anymore,” she says quietly. She can feel her chin quivering as she stares miserably at the concrete floor. This could not have been real. This could not have been real, and that’s how she knows it absolutely was.

“You are different now, Jemma,” he starts. She nods, trying to swallow this pill. “But you can recover some of what you lost. And you can rebuild what you can’t. This is not the end of you.”

That’s all it takes. She cries freely now, big, grave-digging sobs filling the room. Andrew gets up and sits next to her, places a hand on her back as she hunches over and carves out new space in her brain.

 

#

 

It rings four times, and she counts them knowing that at any moment he could pick up.

“Oy! What d’you want?”

There’s commotion on the other side of the line before she can even get a word in, and Lance yells at the disturbance. “It’s my sister, you wankers!” Then she hears a cacophony of voices shouting what they could do with said sister, but they dim as Lance presumably leaves the room.

“Hey,” he says finally. “You alright?”

She doesn’t answer that question. “I don’t mean to disturb you while you're undercover but I really need to speak with May.”

“Whatever you want, love,” he promises. “But why didn’t you just call her yourself?”

“So you could warn her.”

Lance is quiet for a moment, probably mulling over what that means. He’s always found their relationship a bit strange.

“I’ll find her.”

“Can I ask you a question?” Jemma broaches.

“Shoot.”

“Are you undercover as a chav?”

“Shut up.” The noise level grows again. “Found her.” And then it’s silent for a moment as he does what Jemma asked.

When sound returns, it’s just soft breath and night-time noises again. “Simmons.”

“May.”

Jemma listens as May takes in a deep breath, and then: “I’m sorry that—”

“Don’t,” Jemma stops her. “It’s okay. Just talk to me. Tell me about the mission.”

Quietly, almost imperceptibly, May sighs. This is a tall order for her, but Jemma craves it.

So May speaks.

 

#

 

“Do you have hope that you’ll recover?” Andrew asks her gently.

Jemma thinks about this for a long time. She’s found that Andrew doesn’t mind if she’s quiet, as long as it’s leading to something.

“I will never be the person I was before this,” she says carefully.

“That’s not exactly what I asked,” he notes.

“I know but…” She thinks again. “I will recover. Because there’s no other option.”

“What do you mean?” It’s a very _Andrew_ question, but she’s been playing by his rules more and more.

“I mean...I don’t want to be trapped there anymore.”

“Do you feel like you’re still there?”

“Sometimes,” she murmurs, strange look in her eye. “I’m never going to forget what it looked like or smelled like or tasted like. But those can be memories, instead of, well, PTSD.”

He leans back in his chair, quiet for a moment. “You know, I never said you had PTSD.”

She raises an eyebrow, and he’s caught.

“But you’re correct, Dr. Simmons.”

“I know.” But she says it gravely, so Andrew keeps quiet. Something is coming. “I think I’ve had it for a long time,” she whispers.

When she looks up finally, Andrew is grinning at her like he can’t help himself, a face of pure hope. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”

 


End file.
